Brooklyn Rules

Here's a good idea for a movie: Three boys grow up together as best friends in a hardscrabble Italian-American section of Brooklyn. They remain tight as they reach adulthood, even as one chooses law school, one opts for a post office job, and the third gets mixed up in the mob.

It's such a good idea, in fact, that it's been done about 50 gazillion times since it was seared into our collective memory by "Manhattan Melodrama," the film that John Dillinger famously saw in Chicago before getting rubbed out.

"The Sopranos" executive producer and sometime writer Terence Winter has nonetheless seen fit to trot it out for an encore, sacrificing his better sense to a seizure of nostalgia for his own childhood. If Winter had an extraordinary youth, it eludes "Brooklyn Rules," another generic memory piece in which the now-successful writer takes us on a thinly veiled tour of the burger joints, bowling alleys and faces from his formative grunge years.

"School was a way out of the neighborhood, a chance to be someone," says deli manager Michael (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the film's droning narrator as he explains his decision to go on to college. Michael's insipid observations likewise reduce his buddies Carmine (Scott Caan) and Bobby (Jerry Ferrara) to the stuff that cliches were made of: respectively, the incorrigible thug-in-training and the God-fearing cheapskate with the insouciant manner. Despite their basic integrity and work ethic, Michael and Bobby get dragged into the mud by Carmine, who becomes an aide-de-camp to a neighborhood mobster (Alec Baldwin).

Director Michael Corrente works up a convincing rapport between his actors. But the good performances and sporadically vervy dialogue are thwarted by the vapid narrator's voice, which insists on putting a warm-fuzzy spin on some pretty reprehensible behavior.